Essays on postmodernism and modernism

The unveiling event exposed ███ individuals to the anomalous effects of SCP-1226. Those gallery patrons and employees not exposed were killed by exposed subjects over the next half hour, either through bludgeoning, cannibalism, ██████ ███████████, or some combination thereof. 911 calls and police reports were intercepted by MTF Upsilon-23 ("Art Critics"), affected subjects captured or eliminated, and amnesiacs administered to witnesses and first responders. SCP-1226's anomalous effects were confirmed on-site by MTF Upsilon-23, and SCP-1226 was taken into containment.

The value-premises upholding academic research have been maintained by what Lyotard considers to be quasi-mythological beliefs about human purpose, human reason, and human progress—large, background constructs he calls " metanarratives ". These metanarratives still remain in Western society but are now being undermined by rapid Informatization and the commercialization of the university and its functions. The shift of authority from the presence and intuition of knowers—from the good faith of reason to seek diverse knowledge integrated for human benefit or truth fidelity—to the automated database and the market had, in Lyotard's view, the power to unravel the very idea of "justification" or "legitimation" and, with it, the rationale for research altogether, especially in disciplines pertaining to human life, society, and meaning. We are now controlled not by binding extra-linguistic value paradigms defining notions of collective identity and ultimate purpose, but rather by our automatic responses to different species of "language games" (a concept Lyotard imports from J. L. Austin 's theory of speech acts ). In his vision of a solution to this "vertigo", Lyotard opposes the assumptions of universality , consensus, and generality that he identified within the thought of humanistic, Neo-Kantian philosophers like Jürgen Habermas , and proposes a continuation of experimentation and diversity to be assessed pragmatically in the context of language games rather than via appeal to a resurrected series of transcendentals and metaphysical unities.

By declaring that there is no truth and no morality, that all is meaningless and that life itself is a meaningless problem; by announcing that religion and philosophy, history and tradition are symptoms of will of power and symbols of decadence; by raising doubt, cynicism and ambivalence to an arch value; by its acceptance of barbarism and embrace of evil and hence legitimation of every act of cruelty, neglect and intolerance; by appropriating the knowledge, history and cultural products of the Others; by embarking on a crusade to transform Other cultures into ahistorical, identity-less masses and perpetual consumers of its cultural products; by isolating and further marginalizing Other cultures by irony and ridicule; by attempting to subsume Other cultures into the grand narrative of bourgeois liberalism, free market capitalism and secularism; by giving a new life to the old tools of colonial domination and subjugation – by all these means, postmodernism has declared a war on non-western cultures and societies.